Poetry in film can be a tricky thing. Often when something is described as “poetic” in cinema, it can refer to either the sweeping cinematography of a Terrence Malick or Peter Jackson epic, or it can refer to a contrived storyline about fathers and sons over multiple generations with plenty of Biblical allusions and a whole lot of death and misery..More often than not, poetry in cinema is used to advance a plot or lend some deeper significance to an event where the protagonist is faced with a dilemma..Something like Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, for example, where Dylan Thomas’s ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ serves as a kind of refrain for George Clooney’s character undergoing a personal crisis in the heart of deep space; or Four Weddings and a Funeral, where W.H. Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’ (shock of shocks) is read at the funeral service of one of the film’s deceased main characters..What this list serves to do is examine the best that cinema has to offer poetry as a subject, and since so many excellent movies have been made in recent years that manage to treat the topic seriously, it seemed as good a time as any to set it out before you. Enjoy.